This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Way of the Wolf" by Jordan Belfort. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the 4 types of buyers? How can you identify each type and adjust your sales technique?
The 4 types of buyers are the buyer in heat, the buyer in power, the lookie-loos, and the mistakes. Use straight line marketing to funnel out the best types of buyers.
Read on to learn how to identify the 4 types of buyers from Way of the Wolf.
The 4 Types of Buyers
Straight Line marketing helps take everyone in the sales funnel and find the ones who are likely buyers. There are 4 types of buyers in this funnel:
The Buyer In Heat
This is the best of the 4 types of buyers. Motivated, needs and wants your product, prepared to make a decision on buying immediately. They have some kind of pain to resolve and they’ve already decided to do something about the pain. These types of buyers are great but there aren’t many, they’ll be between 10 and 20 percent of the total.
The Buyer in Power
This is the second-best of the 4 types of buyers. The buyer in power doesn’t feel any big pain from not having something, but they still are fully interested in buying whatever you’re selling. They’ll probably want to shop around for other options more. These types of buyers make up 30 to 40 percent. It’s the buyers in heat and buyers in power who will make it down the Straight Line system past intelligence gathering and can be convinced to go to the end. The purpose of the intelligence gathering is to find these two categories and weed out the following two.
The Lookie-Loos
These are the most destructive out of the 4 types of buyers because they will string the seller along and act like they’re interested but have no actual intention of making a purchase. They’re thus hard to weed out, and when a salesperson can’t close them, they can begin to lose confidence if they think it’s their own fault. They’re at around 30 to 40 percent as well. Here’s how you identify this category:
They ask questions that they know the answer to.
They over-kick the tires on whatever you’re selling, peeking around it a ton.
They sound overly interested, letting out exclamations of pleasure “ooh,” very nice,” and so on.
When you inquire about their finances, they become either totally overconfident or extremely vague.
The Mistakes
These people shouldn’t have been in the sales funnel from the start. They clicked something they didn’t mean to or were brought by someone else. These people cannot be closed but are also very easy to identify.
Remember, while you’re prospecting the 4 types of buyers, you should first identify and weed out mistakes and lookie-loos, then gather intel from the buyers left, and then turn the buyers in power into buyers in heat by emphasizing their pain.
No matter what your campaign, it’s impossible that everyone who enters the slipstream or “sales funnel” will become buyers. If around 50% of people in your funnel become buyers, that’s a good result.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Jordan Belfort's "Way of the Wolf" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Way of the Wolf summary :
- How to sell like Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street
- The 4 steps of the Straight Line selling method
- The 3 types of certainty you have to create to make a successful sale
